Mobile Browsing: A Guide To Self-Inflicted Eyestrain
Recently, I had to spend a great deal of time configuring a number of PDAs, and soon came to loathe them wholeheartedly. A PDAs screen combines all the fun of tiny print with the thrill of a harshly-glowing screen. A stylus is great for menu navigation, but pecking a long URL into the pop-up keyboard (or, worse, the tiny push buttons at the bottom of the unit) is an exercise is maddening frustration. You can read e-mails on a PDA, and use it for all manner of busywork, but its almost impossible to get any real work done with one.
The PDA: bling for management.
That said, you might need to use a PDA, oh unfortunate reader, and you may find yourself discontented with your PDAs included web browser. Heres a look at the good, the bad, and the downright ugly among popular mobile browers:
Microsoft has a hold in every facet of the IT world, and mobile browsing is no exception. If you have a PDA running either Windows CE or Windows Mobile 2003, odds are youre using Internet Explorer Mobile. Its serviceable enough, with the familiar IE interface, and the navigation bar is fairly easy to use.
Still, it lacks tabbed browsing, like most modern browsers, and beyond a few basics, its almost impossible to customize the settings. You can deleted cookies and clear the browsing history, but beyond that, youre stuck with the hardwired settings. To make matters worse, IE Mobile has virtually no support for Java of any kind, so if you need to visit a website with Java components, youre out of luck.
IE Mobiles okay if you dont have anything better, but if you do, then theres no reason to stick with it.
Minimo:
Minimo is the Mozilla Foundations attempt to create a mobile browser. Mozilla Firefox is the leading challenger to Internet Explorer, so I decided to give Minimo a shot. After all, Firefox is great, so why not Minimo?
Wrong.
In the Mozilla family, if Firefox is the favored child, then Minimo is the deformed homicidal cousin no one talks about it. For one thing, its big; the installer file is over eight megabytes, and the installed program takes up an appalling amount of precious memory space. Minimo currently only works on Windows CE 4.2 and 5.0, and not at all on Windows Mobile 2003, which means youd have to install it on older PDAs, where space is often very tight.
Assuming Minimo does install, it doesnt work very well. Its prone to odd errors and hangups, and on three separate occasions I saw it completely freeze up the PDA. This does not make for an enjoyable browsing experience.
Still, Minimo is very, very new, and currently is only at version 0.016. Perhaps it might develop into a more robust browser in the future. In the meantime, however, Minimo is best avoided by all but Mozilla fanatics and those who enjoy riding the bleeding edge.
ThunderHawk:
Bitstream Wireless produces the dramatically named ThunderHawk browser. Its a fairly solid product. It provides excellent support for standards, a reasonably small memory footprint, and fairly snappy performance. Its far more configurable than IE Mobile, too, and you can switch off support for various standards as needed.
The best feature is landscape view, or, to put it more bluntly, full-screen, removing the clutter at the top and bottom of the PDAs screen. Furthermore, the display is turned sideways, making the best use of the screen height. Its far easier to read a long document in landscape view than in normal view.
ThunderHawk is not free, alas, but theres a thirty-day evaluation version to try before you buy.
Opera Mobile/Opera Mini:But Opera Mobile and Opera Mini are far and away the best mobile browsers available today. Opera Mobile is probably the only mobile browsers to feature tabbed browsing. Granted, on a small PDA screen, keeping a large number of tabs open becomes impractical, but its still a useful feature. Opera Mobile also features support for most standards.
Opera Minis selling point is, well, its size, or remarkable lack thereof. It takes up less space than any of the other browsers I looked at, yet still manages to retain a great deal of functionality, including JavaScript support. It cannot connect to a secure site with an improperly signed certificate, however. While this might be a security feature, an appalling number of secure corporate intranet sites run off self-signed certificates, which might make Opera Mini impractical for many corporate users.
Neither Opera Mobile nor Opera Mini are free, thought there are trial versions available for download. All in all, if you have to buy a mobile browser, the Opera browser is the best value for your dollar.
Correction: Opera Mini is, in fact, free, which definitely makes it one of the best choices for mobile browsing. Thanks to the commentators for pointing that out.
Related posts:
- Opera Mini Comes to Windows Mobile Handsets
- Browser Wars : Who’s Fighting Who?
- Opera 10.5 brings new JavaScript engine
- IE 9 To Enhance Tab Browsing – Quick Tabs To Be Improved
- 7 Reasons not to Use IE
Filed Under: Web
Opera Mini is free (Opera Mobile is not) and an easy download away (if you choose to get it by SMS there is a small fee). This is written with Mini on a phone btw.
Small note: Opera Mini is free. It is a small application that works together with a transforming server that does most of the actual browsing work – and use of this service is free as well. This also explains why this is not the most suitable browser for high-security actions online – you’ll need Opera Mobile for this.
Anyone can install Opera Mini on any device that supports Java ME. This includes almost all phones sold today. Of course, the bigger your screen the better your browsing experience.